While I agree that Reflector has all the right reasons to become a payed app I don't believe the comparison with Visual Studio Express is justified. The Visual Studio vendor (Microsoft) owns the ecosystem and charges for the operating system AND for servers like SQL Server. It also charges for other products which Visual Studio supports development for like Office and Sharepoint. It is not hard to realise that Windows-only programs (the kind developed with Visual Studio) strengthen the MS ecosystem and thus increase profits from Windows, Office and other products. This is how all other developer tools nowadays are financed. This is how Oracle makes NetBeans free for example. That being said "at the end of the day you have to eat" is not valid argument for Visual Studio (but it is for Reflector).

As a developer I would like to see Microsoft practicing what they preach ("Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" anyone?) and give us (developers in the MS ecosystem) more and better free tools than other ecosystems instead of exactly the opposite. Of course this is MS's decision to make. As developers (or decision makers) ours decision to make is to choose development platform and the availability of free tools is surely a part of this decision.

Reflector killed themselves. They canablize their own pro product by making the feature rich free version. They should have make the free version crappy enough to stand out their pro products. Tons of businesses does that to make sure their higher end prodect did not get killed by cheaper one.

Their feature rich free version made them popular, but, at the same time, that's how they fall.

Any news on homebrew support for the new WP7 update? What will happen if I DON'T decide to upgrade to the new firmware? Will certain features of the phone stop working, will it force an automatic upgrade?

I disagree somewhat with the assertion that people are annoyed about Reflector just because it used to be free and now won't be - there's a bit more to it than that. The extra hate comes from the fact that it was a personal project of one person who gave it away for a long time. To a lot of people it's like a park that the owner used to let the public use for free has been sold off to a corportation and now they're charging people to go play there.

When Lutz decided he didn't want to manage Reflector any more he could have open sourced it, but he sold it to RedGate instead. That's his right of course, but by the same right, people should be just as annoyed at Lutz for selling it to RedGate as they are with RedGate for charging for it now. Of course they're not attacking Lutz, partly because it's not directly his decision to start charging for it (even though this is the inevitable consequence of selling it to corporation), and partly because they're still grateful to him for making available for free for all those years.

Thinking about Dan's suggestion that companies should charge for software if they ever plan to charge for it in the future, I tried to think of examples of where this has been a PR problem in the past and I can only think of situations where an existing product or company was bought by a much larger corporation that then discontinued the free version. When Autodesk acquired Alias, they discontinued the free learning version of Maya. They later acquired Softimage and while the free 'modtool' verison of Softimage remains available, it's frozen at the version it was at when they where were acquired. I wonder if anyone has got counter-examples?

If a company wants to charge money for a product; they should do it, because they have to make money in order to continue their operations. As an independent developer of both 'free' and proprietary software, I often get criticized for charging for my software, and refusing to open-source it by the open-source community, and get criticized for not charging for software that I choose to open-source by many of my peers. It's often difficult to decide whether a product should be free or proprietary. In the end, there is room for both 'free' software and proprietary software.

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